Speak Out for Our National Monuments under Review

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The Department of the Interior is reviewing the protected status of 27 national monuments. After explaining what they are, I will be giving the perspective of a photographer of the national parks, with the hope that it will encourage you to speak out for the national monuments.

People know what a national park is, but they often don’t know what a national monument is. They differ in three ways: how they are established, what they protect, who runs them.

First is the way they are established. Congress establishes national parks and national park system units, but only national monuments may be proclaimed by the President. As of this writing, 16 presidents of both parties have proclaimed 157 national monuments using the authority granted to them by the Antiquities Act of 1906. The land has to be already owned by the federal government, it cannot be privately owned nor state-owned – so none of them are “federal land grabs.” There is a very good reason for allowing executive action: legislative action may be too slow to prevent irreversible resource degradation. The first bill to protect the Grand Canyon was introduced in 1882, but it wasn’t until executive orders were placed that the area became protected. The idea of the Antiquities Act of 1906 came when John Lacey (a conservative Republican) saw first hand the looting of archeological sites in the Southwest that was happening while Congress was still debating.

National monuments have varied contents. Many national monuments contain objects and man-made structures, but the language in the Antiquities Act, mentioning “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, or other objects of historic or scientific interest” allows for protection of natural resources as well. The history of the Antiquities Act application confirms that. Twenty five of our most prized national parks were first protected as national monuments, starting with the Grand Canyon. Of all the national parks designated since 1969, only two were not national monuments before: National Park of American Samoa and Cuyahoga Valley. The first has a special status as it is made of lands leased from Samoan villagers, while the later is the only national park which ever originated from a national recreation area. And although some national monuments are small, others were some of the largest protected lands in the country.

Here is the list of the national monuments that became national parks:

Acadia

Arches

Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Bryce Canyon

Capitol Reef

Carlsbad Caverns

Channel Islands

Death Valley

Denali

Dry Tortugas

Grand Canyon

Grand Teton

Great Basin

Great Sand Dunes

Joshua Tree

Kenai Fjords

Kobuk Valley

Lake Clark

Lassen Volcanic

Olympic

Petrified Forest

Pinnacles

Saguaro

Wrangell-St. Elias

Zion

In its time, the establishment of some of those the national monuments has been met with much opposition. Critics turned out to be on the wrong side of history. Nowadays, few dispute the value of the resulting national parks. Clearly, time and time again, the Antiquities Act has provided us with some of our most iconic and treasured lands, areas that define America in the eyes of the world.

Yet, two recent executive orders by President Donald Trump are questioning the legitimacy of national monuments created since 1996. The Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, has been instructed to review 27 national monuments designated by the Antiquities Act over the past 21 years to look for “abuses” of the act. Here is the relevant memo.

All national parks are run by the National Park Service (NPS), which celebrated its centennial last year. The NPS has the strictest protection standards of any agency, but not all national monuments are managed by the NPS. There are currently 129 national monuments, and they are managed by eight federal agencies, sometimes with a co-management agreement. NPS manages the most (88), followed by Bureau of Land Management (27), US Forest Service (12), and Fish and Wildlife Service (8). Here is the list of the national monuments under review:

Basin and Range BLM

Bears Ears BLM/USFS

Berryessa Snow Mountain BLM/USFS

Canyons of the Ancients Colorado BLM

Carrizo Plain BLM

Cascade Siskiyou BLM

Craters of the Moon (2000 expansion only) BLM/NPS

Giant Sequoia USFS

Gold Butte BLM

Grand Canyon-Parashant BLM,NPS

Grand Staircase-Escalante BLM

Hanford Reach FWS/DOE

Ironwood Forest BLM

Mojave Trails BLM

Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks BLM

Rio Grande del Norte BLM

Sand to Snow BLM,USFS

San Gabriel Mountains USFS

Sonoran Desert Arizona BLM

Upper Missouri River Breaks BLM

Vermilion Cliffs BLM

Katahdin Woods and Waters NPS

Marianas Trench CNMI/Pacific Ocean FWS

Northeast Canyons and Seamounts NOAA, FWS

Pacific Remote Islands FWS

Papahanaumokuakea NOAA, FWS

Rose Atoll FWS

Some concerns that prompted the review are “The effects of a designation on the available uses of designated Federal lands, including consideration of the multiple-use policy of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act”. Out of the 27, only Katahdin Woods and Waters is primarily managed by the NPS. The BLM is quite open to mixed uses.

Over the past two decades, I have concentrated my efforts on the national parks, which as my readers know, provided me much joy and changed my life. However, I was able to take time away from that project to visit half a dozen of the national monuments under review. I am not going to pretend that I know them in depth, but I have seen enough that I can affirm that they match national parks in beauty and richness. In fact, there are efforts underway to redesignate Craters of the Moon National Monument as a National Park. So at stake here is the future of lands that are deserving of becoming our next national parks.

Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho

Carizzo Plain National Monument, California

Giant Sequoia National Monument, California

Calf Creek Falls, Escalande-Grand Staircase National Monument, Utah

Newspaper Rock, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah

The Wave, Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, Arizona

Sonoran Desert National Monument, Arizona

As part of the review process, the public is being invited to
submit comments on the review.
The comment period opened yesterday and will end July 10, 2017, except for Bears Ears National Monument – a prime target of the review – for which comments must be submitted before May 26, 2017. Blink and you’ll miss it. I hope you take some time to speak out for our national monuments.

4 Comments

I certainly don’t want to see a strip mine dug in the Bears Ears wilderness, but I wonder if capitalism will take care of the problem for the conservation camp anyway. I don’t know of any natural resources in Bears Ears worthy of economic exploitation. Even if Trump wants to open it up for development, no one will do it because there is no viable business. So what are both sides really fighting for? Is there something valuable under the ground that I don’t know about? Oil, gold, water, rare earth mineral? What am I missing?

Are you saying that you don’t know if there are mineral resources in Bears Ears or that you read that there aren’t any? There are quite a few oil and gas wells in the area, so it is possible that there is some potential in the monument, which would be enough reason for impoverished locals to want to preserve the possiblity to extract. And while touring Grand Staircase Escalante, secretary Zinke took a look at a coal seam (https://twitter.com/secretaryzinke/status/862430560605487104). Besides, it’s not inconceivable that part of the opposition to the national monument stems from the mere fact that it was proclaimed by President Obama.

Tommy, it’s not just about minerals, though that could still be a concern. Looting of artifacts has been a huge problem in the Bears Ears area for at least a century. Off-road vehicle use has also been extremely difficult for the BLM to manage there. Combine that with greatly increased information about sensitive sites on the internet, and you have a real need for much greater authority and resources to manage the area. I’ve been visiting it for almost 30 years, and I really wish it could just be ignored and left alone, but I just can’t avoid the conclusion that the place seriously needs a step up in visitor education, site monitoring and law enforcement.

Jackson, thanks for your perspective. Although I haven’t been there, I’d say some of the most beautiful images of Indian ruins I’ve seen, by photographers like Ray McSavaney and John Sexton are from the area, and if anything warrants protection as “antiquities”, those certainly do!

QT Luong is a full-time photographer and author with a broad range of work on natural and cultural landscapes, noted for being the first to photograph each of the 60 US National Parks - in large format, the subject of Treasured Lands, winner of six national book awards.